Sunday, November 28, 2010

This Is Totally Not The Cover Of the Book or The Title

This is not going to be the cover of the upcoming book--(click to biggerify--it is entirely worth it)It's classy as all fuck, but I decided I want something with a little more color...

Nor is it the official title--which is, as of now, "Vornheim: The Complete City Kit".

But, hey, I went to all the trouble to mock it up, so I figured I'd let you see it.

Meanhwile, the book is pretty much done. I just have to edit it and dot the I's and cross the T's and all that.

I'm also getting playtest reports back, which is more fun than I expected.

Oh, here's a request for y'all:

The book will include, among many other things, a somewhat improved, streamlined & DeLuxified version of the Urbancrawl Rules I posted a while back, so if anybody reading this has used those and has ideas about how they could be improved or any suggestions about parts of them that worked extremely well for you, please do let me know.

After staring at the image for a while, magic eye style, what it ghost hacks into my brain as to what it wants to be is just a single full bleed color background, maybe similar in color to the red frame stripe, with the spire image against it and the title superimposed over the middle. Maybe you can picture that, sort of an inviting-yet-ominous red value with the black image, still classy, not busy, design-y with the letters in front. It's what makes me think "yeah, that's the cover I'd buy it with."

I'm looking forward to this product whatever the cover dress is like, though.

My group really digs on the "urbancrawl" rules. They are working real nice for my roommates Ptolus campaign, where there are few encounters that don't happen on the streets, sure the Ptolus book probably contains all the neighbourhoods and stuff, but your system is so much faster. Why waste the time looking up how wide the tavern is, and how many doors down the whorehouse is when we can just get on with the fun. For my own group I once used the "urbancrawl" to prep a huge, four-bristolboard city map, street names and everything. Using 4D10, one per battlemat, the area finished up quick and easy. I really found that the ecology of this area of the city sort of wrote itself once i could see where traffic patterns would be and such, really saved my brain. I also learned long ago that if you present a large party with a huge map all at once, they will split up and get into trouble, which serves them right!